Battered Women's Syndrome: The Burning Bed

After reading the Leidholm and Norman cases and watching The Burning Bed, I believe that Battered Women’s Syndrome should be a valid defense to murder. So many women all across the world these days get not only physically, verbally but mentally abused by their spouses. In the case of Janice Leidholm after being abused by her husband for years one argument and attack before bed was her breaking point. She stabbed her husband in his sleep. When a man abuses a women it does not just cause physical damage, it effects the women as a whole. Mentally it makes the women feel hopeless and scared. Not wanting to tell anyone, women tend to keep it all to themselves because a lot of times they are abused because their spouses fill their ears with comments
that are degrading to them and make them believe that something is wrong with them and they have to hit and attack them because they deserve it. Which makes the women not want to confine in anyone because they know that if their spouse found out the attacks would be that much worse. Every women has a different breaking point and I believe that it is a depiction of how physical abuse can cause problems mentally. The mind can only take so much and at a certain point the women is going to attack back to defend her self. Even if it is done at a time were there is no physical abuse happening, like when the spouse is sleeping, I think that it is when the women feels most powerful. They become afraid of their spouse and the thought of attacking him backing while being attacked is fearful to the women because the spouse would fight that much harder to have the upper hand. Sometimes murder is the only way for women who are in a situation like this to live their life.